Learn About Us

Board of Directors

The Alliance for American Quilts' Executive Director, Board of Directors, and Board Committees—comprised of quiltmakers, quilt scholars, quilt industry representatives, and others with related expertise—carry out the planning and implementation of the organization's projects.

Executive Committes of the Board

Biographies of Board Members

Katherine J. Adams served from 1981 to 2002 as associate director of the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Her responsibilities included collection development, publications, and administration of Winedale, a complex of historic structures and modern educational facilities located in rural south-central Texas. She helped establish the Center's Winedale Regional Center for the Quilt. Kate has lectured and published on southern women's history, printed ephemera, and library history; she is co-editor of and a contributor to Inside the Natchez Trace Collection: New Sources for Southern History (1999). She held an editorial fellowship at the University of Oklahoma Press, and she received training in archival administration at the National Archives. She holds an MA in history from the University of Oklahoma and an MA in library science from the University of Texas. Kate retired in December 2001 and is currently busy gardening, swimming, reading, and being a novice quilter. She and her husband David own an Alaskan truck camper and travel often.

Frances Holliday Alford has a long career as an educator, a philanthropist, and an artist-quilter. She spent her first twenty five professional years as a Special Education teacher, taking time to spend two years in South Korea as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer. Known for her imaginative quirky quilted art, Frances has demonstrated her unusual take on embellishment in Quilting Arts Magazine venues including television, virtual studio and written articles. She has shown her work internationally. Teaching, sharing and encouraging are trademarks of her commitment to quilting as an art form. Frances learned to hem a table cloth at six and by high school, she was constructing most of her clothes, dividing her time between sewing and her "real art." A native Texan, Frances divides her time between Austin, Texas and her vacation home in Grafton, Vermont. She has a Master of Education degree from the University of Arizona.

Meg Cox, journalist and author, learned quiltmaking from her mother in 1989 and has been a passionate quilter ever since. She spent six years researching and writing a resource guide for 21st century quilters, The Quilter's Catalog: A Comprehensive Resource Guide (Workman Publishing, 2008). A working journalist since graduating from Northwestern University in 1975, Cox spent 17 years as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where her beats ran the gamut from agriculture to culture. Known nationally as an authority on family traditions, Cox has written two books on the topic, The Book of New Family Traditions (Running Press, 2003) and The Heart of A Family: Searching America for New Traditions That Fulfill Us (Random House, 1998). She has contributed articles to a wide range of national magazines and lectures frequently on both quilting and family traditions. Cox lives in Princeton, New Jersey with her husband Richard Leone, a foundation president, and their teenage son, Max.

Patricia Cox Crews is Willa Cather Professor of Textiles and Director of the International Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The IQSC, created under Crews' leadership, is an endowed academic center that holds the world's largest public collection of quilts. She served as advisor to the Nebraska Quilt Project Committee and as primary editor for Nebraska Quilts and Quiltmakers, which won the Smithsonian's Frost Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Crafts in 1993. Her more recent books include A Flowering of Quilts (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) and Wild by Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts (University of Washington Press, 2003). Wild by Design won the 2004 Textile Society of America Shep Award for best book in the field. She earned her B.S. from Virginia Tech; her M.S. from Florida State University and her Ph.D. from Kansas State University where her specialization was in textiles with a minor in American history.

Mark Dunn, president and owner of Moda Fabrics in Dallas, Texas, began his career in Asheville, North Carolina in 1966 as a third generation thread and yarn sales representative. In 1975 he started Moda Fabrics as a company to specialize in supplying independent sewing and quilting stores. Moda designs, prints and distributes high quality cotton fabrics as well as 60,000 unique items for specialty quilt stores. Moda Fabrics supplies over 4,000 independent quilt specialty stores throughout the U.S. and 20 other countries on 5 continents. Currently, Moda Fabrics is developing an educational department to work with schools and charitable organizations. Mark received the "Man of the Year" in 1985 for the sewing industry from the American Jewish Committee. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Quilts, Inc. Houston, Texas. Previously, he was a member of the international group, Inter-Sew, that was dedicated to the preservation of the craft of quilting. Dunn attended the University of South Carolina but has lived in Dallas, Texas for the past 33 years. Dunn is committed to promoting and preserving the art form of quilting.

Barbara G. Fant is active in historic preservation, winning an AIA award for the restoration of Middlekauff Farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland, and a Historic Fredericksburg (Virginia) Foundation award for restoration of the Stevenson-Doggett house. She taught social sciences at the Washington Technical Institute (a forerunner to UDC), chaired her area's first elected advisory neighborhood commission and raised private funds to build a community recreation center at Horace Mann Elementary School before working as a research associate and fund raiser at the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies. Her interest in quilting as an art form and cultural artifact was inspired by the 19th century quilts made by her maternal grandmother's Pennsylvania Deutsche family members. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, she was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and currently lives in Washington, DC. She received her A. B. degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master's in teaching from Harvard University, and a doctoral degree in American civilization from George Washington University.

Jerry Goldman has been a Professor of political science at Northwestern University for more than thirty years. His research interests cover the American judiciary, American politics, information technology, and research methods. He teaches classes on constitutional law, civil rights and liberties, and American government and politics. Goldman is now on extended leave to work under the university's information technology sector while completing his NSF-sponsored work on Supreme Court audio. He directs the OYEZ Project, a vast multimedia archive devoted to the Court, the justices, and the cases they hear and decide. Goldman also worked with Kent Portney and Steve Cohen (Tufts) to create the first multimedia, internet-based simulation of criminal sentencing practices. Goldman has a passion for art and quilt-making in particular.

Angela Hodapp is senior features editor at Quilters Newsletter Magazine. After earning a BA in English and secondary education from the University of Northern Colorado in 1996, she worked with at-risk teenagers in a residential facility and taught junior high English, speech, mass media, art, and crafts. In 2002, she completed her master’s coursework in English and communication development at Colorado State University; her thesis is still in progress. That same summer, she graduated from the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver. Angie learned to crochet, knit, and cross-stitch when she was very young, and she received her first sewing machine for her high school graduation. She taught herself to sew clothing, handbags, dolls, and, eventually, quilts, which are now all she makes. Angie also writes fiction and creative nonfiction and dabbles in drawing and painting.

Katherine Burger Johnson is Archivist for Manuscript Collections at the University Archives and Records Center, and Archivist/Curator at the Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, University of Louisville, where she also serves as an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. Her research interests are in 20th century social and women's history, with concentrations in nursing and medical care in World War I, and on Louisville women. She has written and presented extensively on these topics at national and international conferences. She also wrote the University of Louisville's section of the NEH grant for the pilot project of the Quilt Index and oversaw the input of the quilt data from the Kentucky Quilt Project. Johnson earned her Bachelor of Liberal Studies and her Master of Arts in History from U of L and has additional archival training from the National Archives and Records Administration.

Mark Kornbluh is Director of MATRIX, The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences OnLine and Associate Professor of History at Michigan State. The largest humanities technology center in an American university, MATRIX's research focuses on multimedia digital repositories, educational uses of online content, and the use of the Internet for development. Kornbluh serves as the principal investigator on a wide variety of online educational projects including the Quilt Index and Historical Voices. As a historian, Kornbluh is a specialist in Modern American political and cultural history. The author of Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern Electoral Politics, 1880-1918, Kornbluh's historical scholarship focuses on political participation in the United States.

Jane Evins Leonard grew up living in and translating the cultures of Washington, DC and the rural highland rim area of middle Tennessee. She began collecting and resonating with quilts as a teenager and has recently “graduated” to the ranks of (very humble, beginner) quilt maker by producing an “Irish Chain” quilt for her first grandchild! She earned a B.A. in French from the University of Tennessee, an M.A.T. from Vanderbilt University and taught in public and private schools in Tennessee, Connecticut, and North Carolina. Later, she earned a J.D. from Vanderbilt Law School and was admitted to the Bar in Tennessee and DC. As mother of four, she shifted from workplace to home, editing school and neighborhood newsletters, serving two terms as an elected DC Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, and chairing The Pilgrimage, a DC hostel and seminar center. She currently heads the Joe L. Evins Foundation, a Tennessee nonprofit corporation, and has just completed restoration of her historic Tennessee home.

Linda Pumphrey is National Sales Manager for Leggett & Platt. Since joining the Mountain Mist team in 1989, she has promoted the brand, developed national marketing programs and new quilting related products. She is currently Curator of the Historical Mountain Mist Corporate Quilt Collection. She has served on the Advisory Board of the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; treasurer of the American Quilt Study Group and currently is Vice President of Public Service of the International Quilt Association and on the Advisory Board for Quilts' Inc, Houston, TX. Her love of quilting grew from her mother and her grandmothers. She can trace back that there have been quilters in her family for at least five generations. She holds a M.B.A from the University of Denver.

Justine Richardson is a documentary videomaker and educational media specialist, currently working at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at Michigan State University. Ms. Richardson serves as project director and manager for a number of MATRIX development and project activities including the Quilt Index and the Quilt Treasures projects. She has ten years experience in film and video production for public television, community development and nonprofit organizations. For six years she worked at Appalshop, an Appalachian media arts center located in her hometown of Whitesburg, Kentucky. There she produced several documentary productions including Girls' Hoops, a history of girls' basketball in Kentucky, which was broadcast on PBS in 2000. She grew up loving quilts and surrounded by excellent traditional quiltmakers in her community. Her academic background includes a bachelor's degree in art history from Yale University and a master's degree in American Studies from Michigan State University.

Keisha Roberts is an artist, curator, and researcher whose work integrates cultural, familial, and personal memory, commemoration, silence and narrative. She wrote the chapter "Resistance and Political Struggles" in the book Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Jim Crow South, which won several awards including the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Book Award. Roberts is executive director of QuiltProQuo, president pro tem of the Professional Art Quilt Alliance-South, and is actively engaged on several museum boards and committees. She has curated and exhibited in exhibitions across the country and her work is held in private and public collections in the United States, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and South Africa. She holds degrees in African and African American studies, history, and women's studies, and a certificate in communications from Duke University, and is currently studying nonprofit management at Duke University and collections management and preventive conservation in the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program in Collection Care at The George Washington University.

Le Rowell is an independent curator and speaker who specializes in the American quilt tradition to build bridges of friendship and understanding across cultural borders. She has produced numerous quilt exhibitions in the U.S. and overseas and showcased American quilt collections at three ambassadorial residences. She lectures on Quilts as Diplomacy and Oral History and introduced American quiltmaking to Bolivia, Portugal, Luxembourg and Kyrgyzstan. In 1993 she founded the International Quilt Guild of Luxembourg. Her exhibition for Luxembourg's year as "Cultural Capital of Europe" (1995) showcased American-influenced art quilts. In 2001 she became co-chair of the Q.S.O.S Task Force. She served on the National Advisory Council of the American Folk Art Museum in New York City (1989-1996) and since 1996 has been a board member of the Virginia Quilt Museum, Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Janneken Smucker a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Delaware in the Program in the History of American Civilization. Her dissertation in process, "From Rags to Riches: Amish Quilts and the Crafting of Value," explores these objects and the people who loved them during the last forty years. During 2008-09 she is a McNeil Dissertation Fellow at Winterthur Museum and Library, a James Renwick Fellow in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Quilt Study Center's Visiting Scholar, and the American Quilt Study Group's Meredith Scholar. Janneken began her academic study of quilts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, earning her MA in Textile History. She curated the International Quilt Study Center's exhibit, "At the Crossing: Midwestern Amish Crib Quilts and the Intersection of Cultures" and co-authored its catalog, Amish Crib Quilts from the Midwest: The Sara Miller Collection. Her recent publications can be found in Mennonite Quarterly Review, Uncoverings, and Winterthur Portfolio.

Mary Evelynn Sorrell, Assistant Director at the Center for American History, University of Texas, directs the Winedale Historical Complex and the Winedale Quilt Collection. Winedale consists of 5 historical houses, 2 barns, dining hall & dormitory, school house, 1 lake, 2 ponds, & 225 acres. Programming consists of symposia, open houses with historically accurate demonstrations, workshops relating to our historical past and exhibitions. Ms. Sorrell works with the Herb Society of America, Pioneer Unit, Master Naturalists of Texas, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Association of American Museums, Texas Association of Museums, American Quilt Study Group, International Quilt Festival, and the Alliance for American Quilts. Mary Evelynn’s past experience includes being director of a contemporary art museum in Montana, the University of Wisconsin-Stout art gallery, Long Beach, CA. City College art gallery, Bridge Center for Contemporary Art, ElPaso, TX & Lawndale Art & Performance Center in Houston. Her interests are in the Winedale quilt collection & quilt history, as well as the Winedale 19th century handmade furniture collection. She collects folk art as well as contemporary art. She received her BFA in Photography in 1981, and her Master’s in Nonfiction Professional Writing in 1999. Her dissertation was “On the Edge: Contemporary Art in Los Angeles”.

Marybeth C. Stalp is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Northern Iowa. She received a B.A. from Regis University (1993), an M.A. from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (1996), and a Ph.D. at the University of Georgia (2001). Her research areas comprise gender, culture, leisure, and qualitative methods. Her first book, Quilting: The Fabric of Everyday Life (2007, Berg) is an interview study with 70 middle-aged U.S. women quilters, examining how and why women engage in this traditional art form in contemporary times. Despite the family tensions that can emerge around quilting, women continue to find joy from practicing quilting as a non-paid pursuit. In addition to quilters, Stalp also studies the emergence of Red Hat Societies, focusing on the leisure aspects of middle-aged women and the positive spin on aging promoted by RHS membership. She regularly teaches classes in Introductory Sociology, Popular Culture, Gender, and Qualitative Research Methods. Stalp sews clothing, knits and quilts regularly. Similar to other quilters, she has devoted an entire room in her house for sewing and quilting.

Mary Worrall is an Assistant Curator at the Michigan State University Museum. Among her activities at the MSU Museum, Worrall has served as project manager for the Quilt Index, curated numerous interpretive quilt exhibitions including Mary Schafer: A Legacy in Quilt History, Quilts Old and New: Reproductions from Michigan State University Museum, and Redwork: A Textile Tradition in America, and has written on quilts and quiltmaking. She is an avid quilter whose quilting experience includes teaching and working at a quilt shop. Worrall holds a bachelor's degree in Public History from Western Michigan University and a M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.